When I joined the BBC as a news trainee in the Eighties, one of the principles that was drummed into our group of journalists was never to squander the Corporation’s money. Always remember, we were told, that some little old lady or underpaid parent has had to save up to afford the licence fee.

We in radio took this very seriously, catching buses and handing in receipts. Other areas (television, television and television) simply didn’t. They had expensive lunches, kept taxis waiting, flew business class. But then this was the Eighties, and squandering money, even public money, was fashionable. No one scrutinised executives’ pay, knew anything about their expenses, or looked closely at the Corporation’s accounts.

Now we’re in another era, and openness and accountability is supposed to protect the public from unjustifiable expense. If only it did. The just-published annual report from the BBC confirms an appalling culture of careless waste, casual overspending and complacent ignorance among those at the top. On behalf of little old ladies, parents and licence-fee payers everywhere I am in a state of fury and dismay.

The scale of the extravagance over the past few years, revealed both here and at House of Commons hearings last week, is simply staggering. A hundred million pounds squandered on a digital project that never worked. Five million spent on investigating the Jimmy Savile scandals. Some £101,000 on lawyers for the head of news to assist her in answering questions about her role in the Savile affair, £107,000 for legal advice to the ex-director-general George Entwistle, £86,000 for lawyers to Mark Thompson, the previous DG. A payoff of almost £400,000 to an executive who had been in her job for less than two years: a payoff of more than a million pounds for a BBC lifer who was leaving the Corporation with almost four million in his pension pot.

On the evidence emerging now, the individuals on the Trust and the executive were inhabiting a bubble where other people’s money could be sprayed around with impunity. Until the new director-general, Tony Hall, arrived, no one was apparently inclined to ask tough questions about what was being spent and why. Management and oversight — key functions for which all these figures were handsomely rewarded — apparently consisted of giving others vague assurances that everything was being done properly and was working well.

No one is more depressed by all these facts and revelations than the vast majority of BBC staff, whose salaries and working conditions have been deterioriating steadily

Mark Thompson, then the director-general, assured MPs two years ago that the digital media initiative was being pioneered and that programmes made with it were going to air. He sounded utterly confident of his facts, and yet what he asserted was fantasy: the project hadn’t produced any workable results at all. Who was misleading whom? We don’t yet have any answers to that. At the same time, we now know, a senior technical executive was acting as a whistleblower, writing to the Trust to warn them that the project was a disaster and that Parliament was being misled. The trustee to whom he wrote says now that he didn’t read the letter fully at the time, and certainly no one in the hierarchy bothered to ask the whistleblower a single question — he was simply sent a brush-off.

The same incurious irresponsibility extended to senior executives’ payoffs. Top-level managers who were being made redundant, or sacked, or were simply departing for other jobs, were given hundreds of thousands of pounds more than their contracts demanded. Why? We don’t know that either. Not one powerful figure has stepped forward to say: That rotten decision? Yes, that was mine. Instead, public exposure has sent everyone concerned rushing for cover, and blaming everybody else.

The head of human resources, Lucy Adams, for whose judgment we pay £320,000 a year, claimed to an MPs’ committee last week that she was “uncomfortable” about the excess payments but that she had gone along with them. The chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, an expert layer-off of blame, said indignantly that the ex-DG Mark Thompson had never warned him that the payoffs exceeded the contractual terms. He told the committee grimly that Thompson should have to answer for it. From America Thompson, who had said he was too busy to attend the hearing, retorted that he had told the Trust that “maximum payments” would be allowed, and that the relevant Trustees had approved it. Did anyone understand what “maximum payments” meant, and did anyone care to ask? From what we glimpse so far, apparently not.

Then we come to the most recent example of insane corporate generosity: the lawyers’ fees for the senior managers who were being questioned about their journalistic judgments in the Savile affair. Some organisations might have decided that asking its current and ex-employees factual questions about how they had done their jobs was not a matter requiring lawyers. Not the BBC. At the time of the inquiry, astounded journalists, including me, asked the press office what the limits on lawyers’ costs were. The BBC — open, transparent, accountable — refused to say, stating only that a “small capped amount in legal fees” was available to those asking for it. Junior producers claimed privately they were limited to £3,500 each. But now, in the annual report, we discover the meaning of a “small cap” : more than a hundred thousand pounds each, made available to defend the reputations of those at the very top.

No one is more depressed by all these facts and revelations than the vast majority of BBC staff, whose salaries and working conditions have been deterioriating steadily over the same period in which the Trust and the executives were being so profligate. The new DG, Tony Hall, intends to change this culture, in which a small circle makes indefensible decisions privately and then declines to take responsibility for them. He’s bringing in smart and principled outsiders to key posts in news and strategy — James Harding, the former editor of The Times, James Purnell, the ex-culture secretary; Ian Katz, previously the Guardian’s deputy editor. But he’s wrestling with an organisation that has learned to reward its senior managers for wariness, dissimulation, ignorance and professions of outraged innocence. Transforming the BBC’s internal culture will be vital for its legitimacy, but that task is going to be hard.